maryciani5@gmail.com  979-575-1825 

An Art of Warning and Witness:

Destroying the Host Planet.

What we once feared is now upon us.

Former Art: For decades, I drew and painted series of emotional symbols of lives lived in time: entanglements, love, empty advice, impossible challenges, seeking the ineffable:

I and Thou, Vines, Ladders, and Map Mountain Moon.

Present Art: Then the aperture widened to the life of the planet, to visions of global destruction caused by the industrial revolution and the burning of fossil fuels: torrents first of water, then black oil and red blood (cause and effect):

1. Flood Drawings, 2. Deluge Paintings, and 3. Postcards from the Future.

Warning and Witness: Although this art began as an Art of Warning of future climate calamity, it soon became an Art of Witness as we began to suffer extreme manmade chaos: bomb cyclones, atmospheric rivers, derecho, heat dome, firenado, snowpocalypse, and orange skies.

What we feared is now upon us.

A Long Tradition: I am an artist in a long tradition of protest, we who respond to the violence of our time: Goya’s Third of May, 1808, Picasso’s Guernica, Kollwitz’s Death Takes the Children, and so many more.

Picasso: “When German soldiers used to come to my studio and look at my pictures of Guernica, they'd ask 'Did you do this?'. And I'd say, 'No, you did.'

Kollwitz: “I felt that I had no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate.” 

We are artists and this is what we can do.

Burning Petroleum : It is our turn to protest the main violence of our time. I stand with many against the deadly energy foundation of our marvelous civilization. We now know that our tenacious, unrelenting, greedy, and violent extraction, refining, transporting, and burning of petroleum and “natural gas” (methane) cause pollution, poisoning, overheating, and damage to our water, air, planet and ourselves and all who live among us.

These profound mistakes lead to our final disinheritance.